Read Online The Great Sicilian Cat Rescue by Jennifer Pulling - Free Book Online Page B

first heard this music, years ago, I found it all ‘so romantic’. There were candles on the tables and painted jugs full of scarlet wine. Romantic! I could imagine that couple at the opposite table saying it in German, Dutch, Swedish: ‘So romantic’. And that is what my wise Sicilian friends trade on. They have a commodity: La Sicilia ! Blue seas and skies, wine and an excellent cuisine, why not sell it for the best price you can get?
    Tonight it amused me to watch the German tourists pay an inflated price for local wine, clapping their hands and shouting ‘Wunderbar!’
    ‘Jenny?’
    I glanced up and saw the owner, Filippo, had come to our table.
    ‘There is something I have to tell you…’
    His expression was grave. ‘The cat, the one in Castelmola you took to the vet…’
    His voice was almost drowned out by a loud burst of applause and I tried to concentrate.
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘She and many others were poisoned.’
    I had a vision of the last time I had seen Lizzie, lying so contently, blinking in the sunlight. I brought my hands to my face. ‘ No !’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    Stricken, I was gazing at Filippo, trying to take in his words.
    ‘Don’t be sad,’ he told me.
    Don’t be sad! When I felt the earth had shifted beneath me and I was falling into a black hole.
    The music continued, people shouted and sang; they clapped their hands to its rhythms. I stayed on, there was nowhere else to go and I didn’t want to be alone in the apartment. Then I remembered what Antonella had told me about the people in Castelmola who disliked cats. It must have been one of those who rolled poison into balls of meat and threw them down for the unsuspecting creatures to eat. I felt such a rage against them and the terrible act they had committed. Anger like this is fertile ground for notions of revenge but, as the night wore on and my fury turned to grief, I made up my mind I wouldn’t leave it there. Somehow I would help these cats.

TWELVE
Elke, Cat ‘Mother’ to a Myriad Felines
    I had never realised that my landlady Elke was a gattara supreme until the day she invited me to visit her house. It was a few days after I’d received the devastating news of Lizzie, and I welcomed this diversion from my thoughts. She called me when, as usual, I was sitting with my coffee at the picture window.
    â€˜Come up and see my home.’
    I knew that the property gazed out over the Ionian Sea, perched on the top of Capo Sant’Andrea, but I had never been able to discern exactly where or how you reached it.
    â€˜There’s a little road that leads up on the left side of Isola Bella beach,’ she told me. ‘If you wait there, I’ll come and fetch you.’
    The tall gate swung open as if onto a magical domain where few people were admitted. Then came the slow drivealong a rough road winding upward and flanked by rocky outcrops and the towering prickly pear. As we turned into the final stretch, Elke slowed the car to a crawl and I saw the reason why: several cats, which had been sunning themselves, scurried away. She led the way up a leafy-lined path into the garden: the lush beauty of a Mediterranean garden where pots spilled brilliant flowers and there was a straggle of ferns, roses, bougainvillea and that strange bird-like plant, the strelitzia. But most beautiful of all were the cats, so many of them: lurking in the shadows, skulking among plants, having a playful fight in a pool of sunlight. The garden was a cats’ paradise. Tiny kittens regarded me with huge eyes, other cats pressed themselves against Elke’s legs and she bent to talk to them, calling each by name. Found, saved or abandoned by uncaring people, these were the lucky cats who had found Elke. They had their own little shelters set among the plants and she fed them twice daily from her huge store of food kept in an old abandoned church in the grounds.
    We moved into the house, awash with light as if it were an extension of